Jim Dine, Alan Cristea

Two simultaneous exhibitions present the striking work of American artist and printmaker Jim Dine, split across the two spaces of Alan Cristea Gallery on London's Cork Street in Mayfair. A new series of work,  A History of Communism,  forms the focus of one show, whilst a broader selection of work spanning Dine's prolific fifty-year career provides material for the second exhibition, Jim Dine: Printmaker .
How does Jim Dine create his work?
Working primarily with printmaking, Jim Dine's work always involves a layering of different processes. A simple object such as a heart or a hammer is repeatedly printed, redrawn, reprinted, or hand painted, generating hundreds of variations of the same motif. Each layer of ink or paint represents a stage in the image's history.
The exhibition
For 'A History of Communism', Dine re-used lithographic stones that were found in a former socialist art school in East Germany. In lithography, the image is drawn in wax onto the flat plane of a piece of limestone, then treated with acid to etch away the uncovered areas. Dine reworked the found limestones, which were still marked with the images drawn by students of the school in the former German Democratic Republic, adding his familiar motifs. The hammers, scissors, shears, and other tools that Dine has drawn for years strangely resemble soviet iconography. 'A History of Communism' provides a singularly subjective and subtle lineage between the original drawings and Dine's own additions. 
Critical view
Andy Warhol famously said that he loved capitalism because it meant that everything was standardised, and if he bought a Coca-Cola he knew that it would be exactly the same Coca-Cola that the President was drinking. Printmaking became associated with the Soviet Union as they wished to do away with bourgeois, elitist art, undermining the status of the singular art object in favour of a more democratic and collectively produced art that could be easily reproduced. But while the Soviet Union were producing soviet realist propaganda posters, the West had their equivalent in advertising. Paradoxically the Soviet ideals of art as democratic and accessible seem not far from the ideals of the American Pop artists with whom Jim Dine has been aligned. With the iron curtain now firmly pulled away, these echoes of a past that fused art and politics become Dine’s aesthetic and conceptual playground.